MOF Asked to Change Moritomo Documents Release Order

Osaka, Oct. 17 (Jiji Press)–The widow of a Ministry of Finance official who committed suicide requested Friday that the ministry give priority to releasing email messages and other records identifying who had made her husband tamper with official documents regarding the dubious sale of a state-owned land plot to school operator Moritomo Gakuen. Since April, the ministry has been releasing in stages more than 170,000 pages of the so-called Moritomo documents upon court order in a lawsuit launched by the Kinki Local Finance Bureau official’s wife, Masako Akagi. In the written request, the bereaved family’s side criticized that the ministry has so far stopped short of clarifying who had initiated the misconduct and who had given instructions to the official, Toshio Akagi, who killed himself in 2018 under a lot of strain, saying that the way the ministry releases the documents “extremely inefficient.” The ministry was specifically requested to release emails from Nobuhisa Sagawa, former director-general of the ministry’s Financial Bureau, who is believed to have been behind the falsified documents. “I feel that something really important is being concealed,” the widow told a news conference in Osaka. “I want them to disclose the important parts first.” END [Copyright The Jiji Press, Ltd.]